Entertainment

Radiolab, and former Groupon founder and CEO, and now Detour founder, Andrew Mason have been in town collaborating on an immersive Austin audio walking tour that will debut at SXSW 2015. The Detour app that launched last month takes the team’s expert storytelling skills and translates them into reality through voices, music, and ambiance.

A series of reports are circling the web regarding a new top secret project being performed by Apple. This project has been confirmed to be focused on the building of a self-driving car. The project is officially known as Titan.

Christmas morning probably saw more than a few gift recipients searching fruitlessly for just one more HDMI port behind the television. High-Definition Multimedia Interface cables have quickly become the standard for connecting all audio/visual equipment to our televisions, but with everything from your cable box to your PlayStation to your BluRay player to that new streaming media device you found under the tree all vying for one of those precious ports, how do you deal with a lack of them?

Remember the popular IBM commercial from back in 2000, where actor Avery Brooks acknowledges the pivotal year as the century turns and questions the availability and absence of flying cars, saying we were promised this futuristic invention, looking around the roadways and stating, “I don’t see any flying cars.”

If you look around, there are several large name brands that are moving forward and away from your traditional headphone/earbud design. Brands such as Panasonic and Aftershokz both have some type of listening wear making use of bone conduction. One would think that with all of the financial resources they have at hand, they’d have a more audible product. Luckily for everyone, Cynaps is working to take the mobile audio market by storm. Especially for those who find customization important.

The OnAir box is a clever little device that enables music lovers to turn existing stereos and TVs into connected devices to create a true multi-room music listening experience. From what we’ve seen, not only does it provide simplicity of use, but also delivers a great design while offering a great user experience without the need to upload a single file to the cloud.

Streaming video is at an interesting crossroads right now. A generation of content creators raised on YouTube is transitioning to the more social live video experience, exponentially growing the entire streaming industry and building billion dollar streaming platforms. But the technology to support this exploding industry has taken baby steps to better production, and the learning curve for professional live productions is steeper than most YouTubers can handle.

Digital distribution and ownership is commonplace for music, but for movies the digital process is still in its early stages of transition. Music’s exposure grew thanks to its accessibility online. Movies are making a similar transition, but it has not successfully been able to capture and gain visibility. Only a few online movie distributors exist on the markets now, but how are they supposed to help grow digital movie properties? Yekra Theater joins the few online distributors by providing a different business model.

Everything is getting “smart” these days. Basically every device you can think of out there can be connected to the web, stream music and play back videos, serve as a means of communication, etc… To that end, we’re now in a time when those same devices are being developed to become, well, smarter and take on tasks that were once only perceived to be the things of science fiction novels and movies. Case in point: The ability to use voice authentication technology in our homes.

With giant conferences like E3, showing off the coolest new video games to the world, very few innovations arrive in the game industry that’s off the screen. Enter Doozy, an interactive, life-sized board game for everybody ages 8 through 88.